THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Thursday, March 29, 2012

OF THE TOP 200 MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN LOS ANGELES, 176 ARE
MEXICANS, AND MOST OF THE REST ARE RUSSIANS.

ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA HARRIS,NEARLY HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE BY MEX
GANGS.

OF THE A.G.’S 10 MOST WANTEDCRIMINALS IN CA, ALL ARE MEXICANS

CA HAS THE MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON SYSTEM IN THE NATION. HALF THE
INMATES ARE MEXICANS.

THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ENDORSE OBAMA’S OPEN &
UNDEFENDED B0RDERS AND NOW OPERATE OUT OF 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES. ACCORDING TO
THE LA RAZA PRESIDENT OF NARCOMEX, THEY CARTELS HAUL BACK TO NARCOMEX FROM $20
-$60 BILLION! CALDERON BLAMES THE U.S. FOR THIS, BUT THEN THE MEXICAN PEOPLE
BLAME AMERICANS FOR EVERY REASON WHY THERE NATION IS SUCH A DUMPSTER THAT 38
MILLION HAVE FLED NARCOMEX TO COME LOOT AMERICA. NOW THEY ARE DETERMINED TO
TURN OUR COUNTRY INTO A MEX DUMPSTER.

IF YOU DON’T THINK THEY ARE, COME TO MEX GRAFFITI DRENCHED
LOS ANGELES, WHERE ALL JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS, A BILLION DOLLARS ARE HANDED OVER
TO ILLEGALS FOR THEIR ANCHOR BABY WELFARE PROGRAM, AND 95% OF ALL MURDERS ARE
BY MEXICANS!

VIVA LA RAZA? OBAMA DOES DAILY!!! HE NEEDS THEIR ILLEGAL
VOTES, AND TO KEEP HIS WALL ST PAYMASTERS CONTENT WITH THE DEPRESSED WAGES
THESE HORDES OF ILLEGALS CAUSE!

The Obama administration has also cut worksite enforcement efforts
by 70%, allowing illegal immigrants to continue working in jobs that rightfully
belong to citizens and legal workers.

THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!

"We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the
jobs taken by illegal workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas,
co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on
the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should
support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they
need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws."

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in
cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use
the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los
Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang
have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as
murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers
know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony.
Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he
who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against
enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated
cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and
Houston. These “sanctuary
policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting
immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so
irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the
illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk
about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash
from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic,
gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked
about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would
speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much
broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration
policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration
numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of
immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction
between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national
borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that
to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a
gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to
violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case
of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether.
Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in
plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about
his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested
a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops
had had the suspect in
custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration
status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a
deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied
away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains
Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant
population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the
illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some
examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which
total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive
felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that
60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is
illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The
bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes,
extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every
day in L.A. County. The gang
has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived
youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and
racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about
60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li.
Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the
gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following
deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The
LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug
trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang
members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are
virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized
by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the
gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and
stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang
“Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction
is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest
an illegal dealer (known on the
street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new
Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating
Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing
discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a
law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime:
enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers.
Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation,
against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize
illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court
hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target.
These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation,
committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip
to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a
deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the
street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if
the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as
an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the mmigration
felony.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien
crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation,
and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health
care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single
tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that
sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested
not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime
victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting
police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators:
deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status
police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration
reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration
policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public
officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the
law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé
on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders
being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City
Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have
thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned
the council: “This is going to open
a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave
front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents
of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers
dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes,
but such anxiety can never equal a
politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination
process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department
to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang
members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an
illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly
retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration
violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without
putting a witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening
of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a
federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim
police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police ommission: “It is not the time.
It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After
their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown
more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the
scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot
murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit,
criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station
houses. In
turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city
police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies
as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see
daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring. But even were
immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start
enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the
resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming
additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house,
aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of
removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration
officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to
find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through
stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens
who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been
convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who
have been deported following conviction for an
aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years
in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike
Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s,
explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss
and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks,
threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to
another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed
over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually
fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and
Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear
and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a
judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and
appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and
take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal.
Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS
officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not
all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final
orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the
deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or
two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in
2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a
number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring
countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete
indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens
rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the
city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the
ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time
again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last
February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a
letter. When we write a letter, they quire that it be by a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former
NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and
other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to
threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El
Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the
INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture
that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows
theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall
contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that
would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a
criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he
could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately
bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of
federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono
attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive
due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request
delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In
1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born
inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any
review of their deportability. They included 1,198
aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a
creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great
pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of
such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away
from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS
refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami,
fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists
protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the
Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California,
probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics
driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early
1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship
in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton
administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new
welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically
expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in
1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of
thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed
robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from
Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can
keep them in the country ndefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn
are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi
citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a
probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had
been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells
phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s
offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a
puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East,
including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism,
so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently,
he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would
not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist
intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but
the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their
deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an
adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration
attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for
ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens,
the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come
back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal
farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry
in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same
smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are
so many more of
them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part
and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS
had as much effect on the migration of
millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants
themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the
shadows, seemed to regard immigration
authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of
illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in
front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices,
and phone arcades, all catering to the
local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There
is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like
the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping
that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t
worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the
papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government
really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor
inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly
in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at
Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with
six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings,
you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the
coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into
New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her
across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals
and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an
impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as
migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border
controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest
priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and
prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens
who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite
investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak.
That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of
libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently
blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that
ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free
number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social
Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers
verify work eligibility would result in discrimination
against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work
illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a
charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and
thousands of employers pretend to
believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is
actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not
patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will
nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find
an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration
authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has
exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2
million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare
seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment
charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide
investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the
employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry
into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s
congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the
growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the
employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are
ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers
understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture
that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is
the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere,
illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer
expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been
pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state
tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of
cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal
Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to
this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns
that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make itboon to money launderers, immigrant
smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian
man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an
illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of
irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the
border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that
feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the
language of “human rights” to appeal
to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the
term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed,
grouses Illinois congressman Luis
Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you
need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S.
owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive
their kids to school,” said California
assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get
in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law
emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano
studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially
in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of
apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the
reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration,
and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago:
Americans “are fed up with
efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any
people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which
they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea
of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be
surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of
people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent
immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should
expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting
non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies.
By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons
from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more
destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs
seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning
to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In
New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to
14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 11-year-old
Mexican. Such
pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S.
law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal
immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,”
observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva
Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of
social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide
what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

*

Heather Mac DonaldThe
Immigrant Gang PlagueHispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new
underclass in the making.
Summer 2004

Before
immigration optimists issue another rosy prognosis for America’s multicultural
future, they might visit Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly
Hispanic, gang-ridden Rampart district. “Upward and onward” is not a phrase
that comes to mind when speaking to the first- and second-generation immigrant
teens milling around the school this January.

“Most of the people I
used to hang out with when I first came to the school have dropped out,”
observes Jackie, a vivacious illegal alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked
out or got into drugs. Five graduated, and four home girls got pregnant.”

Certainly, none of
the older teens I met outside Belmont was on track to graduate. Jackie herself
flunked ninth grade (“I used to ditch a lot,” she explains) and never caught
up. She is now pursuing a General Equivalency Diploma—a watered-down certificate
for dropouts or expelled students—in the school’s “adult” division. Vanessa,
who sports a tiny horseshoe protruding from her nostrils, is applying to the
adult division, too, having been kicked out of Belmont at age 18. “I didn’t
come to school very often,” says this American-born child of illegal aliens
from El Salvador. Her boyfriend, Albert, a dashing 19-year-old with long,
slicked-back hair, got expelled for truancy but has talked his way back into
the regular high school. “I have good manipulative skills,” he smiles. After a
robbery conviction, Albert was put on probation but broke every rule in the
book: “Curfews, grades, attendance, missed court days,” he boasts. “But they
still let me off the hook.”

These Belmont teens
are no aberration. Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright
American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I
mean the population originating in Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as
distinct from America’s much smaller Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of
Caribbean descent, which have themselves long shown elevated crime and welfare
rates.) Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest
in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999
to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the
country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood
do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.

Debate has recently
heated up over whether Mexican immigration—unique in its scale and in other
important ways—will defeat the American tradition of assimilation. The rise of
underclass behavior among the progeny of Mexicans and other Central Americans
must be part of that debate. There may be assimilation going on, but a
significant portion of it is assimilation downward to the worst elements of
American life. To be sure, most Hispanics are hardworking, law-abiding
residents; they have reclaimed squalid neighborhoods in South Central Los
Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of Hispanic youths I interviewed,
several expressed gratitude for the United States, a sentiment that would be
hard to find among the ordinary run of teenagers. But given the magnitude of
present immigration levels, if only a portion of those from south of the border
goes bad, the costs to society will be enormous.

The
Soledad Enrichment Action Charter School in South Central Los Angeles is at the
vortex of L.A.’s gang culture. Next door to a rose-colored, angel-bedecked
church, the boxy school glowers behind barred gates like those that surround
prisons. Soledad’s students, about half blacks and half Hispanics, have been
kicked out of other schools. They have brought violence with them. In early
March, a gunman opened fire on 20 students entering the school at 7:30 am,
wounding two. Tensions were high again as school let out one day this April. A
boy had been sent home earlier for fighting; the question now was, would he
return to retaliate? The school’s probation officer radioed the LAPD’s 77th
Division to plead for some officers to keep watch, without success. As the
students, dressed in plain white T-shirts, filed out to the sidewalk, two burly
security guards and a gang counselor warily eyed the street.

Asked about gangs,
the teens proudly reel off their affiliations: SOK (Still Out Killing); HTO
(Hispanics Taking Over); JMC (Just Mobbing Crazy). A cocky American-born child
of Salvadoran parents says that most of his peers from the eighth grade are
“locked up or dead.” “Four are dead—three were shot, one was run over.” Were
you just lucky? I ask. “They were gangbanging more than me,” says the
17-year-old, who won’t give his name. “I try to control myself, respect my
parents.” That respect only goes so far. Asked if he’s been in jail, he
swaggers: “Yup, for GTA”—grand theft auto. And he has no intention of leaving
his gang: “They’re the homeys, part of the family.”

Eighteen-year-old
Eric, born here to an illegal Mexican and Guatemalan, is one of the few
students I talked to who doesn’t gangbang, though he is on probation for
second-degree robbery, his second conviction. Half his friends from elementary
school are involved in crime, he says. Of course, gang problems in Los Angeles
schools are hardly confined to academies for delinquents like Soledad. Gang
fights in some of L.A.’s regular high schools draw such crowds that youthful
pickpockets have a field day working the spectators and participants. “People
would steal your pagers and cell phones,” reports one student who has bounced
through several schools.

David
O’Connell, pastor of the church next door to Soledad, has been fighting L.A.’s
gang culture for over a decade. He rues the “ferocious stuff” that is currently
coming out of Central America, sounding weary and pessimistic. But “what’s more
frightening,” he says, “is the disengagement from adults.” Hispanic children
feel that they have to deal with problems themselves, apart from their parents,
according to O’Connell, and they “do so in violent ways.” The adults, for their
part, start to fear young people, including their own children.

The pull to a culture
of violence among Hispanic children begins earlier and earlier, O’Connell says.
Researchers and youth workers across the country confirm his observation. In
Chicago, gangs start recruiting kids at age nine, according to criminologists
studying policing and social trends in the Windy City. The Chicago Community
Policing Evaluation Consortium concluded that gangs have become fully
integrated into Hispanic youth culture; even children not in gangs emulate
their attitudes, dress, and self-presentation. The result is a community in
thrall. Non-affiliated children fear traveling into unknown neighborhoods and
sometimes drop out of school for lack of protection. Adults are just as scared.
They may know who has been spray-painting their garage, for example, but won’t
tell the police for fear that their car will be torched in retaliation. “It’s
like we’re in our own little jails that we can’t leave,” said a resident. “There
isn’t an uninfested place nearby.”

Washington, D.C.,
reports the same “ever-younger” phenomenon. “Recruitment is starting early in
middle school,” says Lori Kaplan, head of D.C.’s Latin American Youth Center.
With early recruitment comes a high school dropout rate of 50 percent. “Gang
culture is gaining more recruits than our ability to get kids out,” Kaplan
laments. “We can get this kid out, but two or three will take his place.” In
May, an 18-year-old member of the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang used a
machete to chop off four left fingers and nearly sever the right hand of a
16-year-old South Side Locos rival in the Washington suburbs.

Ernesto Vega, a
19-year-old Mexican illegal who grew up in New York City, estimates that most
12- to 14-year-old Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in New York are in gangs for
protection. “If you’re Mexican, you can’t go to parties by yourself,” he says.
“People will ask, ‘Who you down with? Que barrio?’ They be checkin’ you
out. But if it’s 20 of you, and 20 of them, then it’s OK.”

For
some children, the choice is: get beat up once a week, or get beat up once to
enter the gang. Others join for the prestige and sense of belonging. Mario
Flores was one of them; he joined Santa Ana, California’s, Westside Compadres.
“When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I wanted them to jump me,” he says in the
soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re like, ‘You want to get down?’ They got
to jumping at you, they go to call you, ‘Trips from Westside Comps’—you feel
good.”

Flores (or “Trips”)
is a depressing specimen of gang culture: uneducated and barely articulate.
He’s sitting on the other side of a Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central
Jail, talking to me over a phone. In and out of jail with dazzling regularity
over the last three years, he most recently left prison on April 14; on April
21, he was arrested again on a rape charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but
raised in Mexico, Flores went to live with cousins in San Bernardino,
California, at age 13 and has been traveling the Southern California gang
circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana, East L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is
slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand gestures accompany his speech like
hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he says, pointing first to his eyes,
then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down with my shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask
if he speaks English or Spanish with his gang. “You speak Chicano,” he says. “
‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English, you’ve got some good words. But the way
you talk, you don’t talk good. You don’t talk like other people.”

Flores expresses the
fierce attachment to territory that is the sine qua non of gang identity. “I
was like, ‘I love my neighborhood. If you don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going
to fuck you up.’ ” Charles Beck, captain of the LAPD’s Rampart Division,
marvels at this emotion. “They all come from identical neighborhoods, identical
families, and go to identical schools, and yet they hate each other with a
passion.” The territorial instincts can only be compared to the Balkans, says
Corporal Kevin Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang investigator. “There’s people who all
they do is patrol gang boundaries. They’re like me, in a way: I’m looking for
bad guys; they look for rivals.”

“Trips” showed his
love for Santa Ana’s Westside Compadres by doing “missions”—robbing bars,
stealing wallets and cell phones, selling drugs—to raise money for the gang.
“If a big homey told me to fuck someone up, I had to,” he explains. The gang
reciprocated by giving him a place to stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise
he lived in cars or on the street, sometimes in a hotel.

The chance that
Flores will ever become a productive member of society is slight. Routinely
kicked out of high school for fighting, he lacks rudimentary skills. Like many
prisoners, he claims to be reading the Bible and thanking Jesus, but such
prison conversions rarely last. His personal life is troubled: “My lady, she
mad at me”—not surprisingly, given his most recent rape charge—and Flores is
not certain she will be waiting for him when he gets out of jail. Most likely,
Flores will continue contributing to the Hispanicization of prisons in
California: in 1970, Hispanics were 12 percent of the state’s population and 16
percent of new prison admits; by 1998, they were 30 percent of the California
population, and 42 percent of new admits.

Even
as it reaches down to ever-younger recruits, gang culture is growing more
lethal. In April, 16-year-old Valentino Arenas drove up to a courthouse in
Pomona, California, and shot to death a randomly chosen California Highway
Patrol officer, in the hope of gaining entry to Pomona’s 12th Street Gang. The
assassination wouldn’t surprise Dennis Farrell, a Nassau County, New York,
homicide detective. “We’re amazed at the openness of shootings,” he says. “When
we do cases with Hispanic gangs, we often get full statements of admission,
almost like they don’t see what’s the big deal.”

The unwritten code
that moderated gang violence three or four decades ago has now fallen away.
“When I grew up,” says Santa Ana native and gang investigator Kevin Ruiz,
“there were rules of engagement: no shooting at churches or at home. Now, no
one is immune.” One of Ruiz’s colleagues on the Santa Ana police force, Mona
Ruiz (no relation), spent her adolescence in Santa Ana gangs; now she tries to
get kids out. “Back then,” she says, “if someone got jumped, you responded with
fistfights, not guns. Guns started in the 1980s.” Earlier gangbangers even
showed a certain fastidiousness of dress: “Guys used to iron their jeans for
two hours,” Mona Ruiz recalls. “Then they wouldn’t sit down” to avoid marring
the crease. All that changed when heroin hit, she says.

The constant invasion
of illegal aliens is worsening gang violence as well. In Phoenix, Arizona, and
surrounding Maricopa County, illegal alien gangs, such as Brown Pride and
Wetback Power, are growing more volatile and dangerous, according to Tom
Bearup, a former sheriff’s department official and current candidate for
sheriff. Even in prison, where they clash with American Hispanics, they are
creating a more vicious environment.

Upward mobility to
the suburbs doesn’t necessarily break the allure of gang culture. An
immigration agent reports that in the middle-class suburbs of southwest Miami,
second- and third-generation Hispanic youths are perpetrating home invasions,
robberies, battery, drug sales, and rape. Kevin Ruiz knows students at the
University of California, Irvine who retain their gang connections. Prosecutors
in formerly crime-free Ventura County, California, sought an injunction this
May against the Colonia Chiques gang after homicides rocketed up; an affidavit
supporting the injunction details how Chiques members terrorize the local
hospital whenever one of the gang arrives with a gunshot wound. Federal law
enforcement officials in Virginia are tracking with alarm the spread of gang
violence from Northern Virginia west into the Shenandoah Valley and south
toward Charlottesville, a trend so disturbing that they secured federal funds
this May to stanch the mayhem. “This is beyond a regional problem. It is, in
fact, a national problem,” said FBI assistant director Michael Mason, head of
the bureau’s Washington field office.

Open-borders
apologists dismiss the Hispanic crime threat by observing that black crime
rates are even higher. True, but irrelevant: the black population is not
growing, whereas Hispanic immigration is reaching virtually every part of the
country, sometimes radically changing local demographics. With a felony arrest
rate up to triple that of whites, Hispanics can dramatically raise community
crime levels.

Many
cops and youth workers blame the increase in gang appeal on the disintegration
of the Hispanic family. The trends are worsening, especially for U.S.-born
Hispanics. In California, 67 percent of children of U.S.-born Hispanic parents
lived in an intact family in 1990; by 1999, that number had dropped to 56
percent. The percentage of Hispanic children living with a single mother in
California rose from 18 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 1999. Nationally, single-parent
households constituted 25 percent of all Hispanic households with minor
children in 1980; by 2000, the proportion had jumped to 34 percent.

The trends in teen
parenthood—the marker of underclass behavior—will almost certainly affect the
crime and gang rate. Hispanics now outrank blacks for teen births; Mexican
teens have higher birthrates than Puerto Ricans, previously the most
“ghettoized” Hispanic subgroup in terms of welfare use and out-of-wedlock
child-rearing. In 2002, there were 83.4 births per 1,000 Hispanic females
between ages 15 and 19, compared with 66.6 among blacks, 28.5 among
non-Hispanic whites, and 18.3 among Asians. Perhaps these young Hispanic
mothers are giving birth as wives? Unlikely. In California, where Latina teens
have the highest birthrate of teens in any state, 79 percent of teen births to
U.S.-born Latinas in 1999 were to unmarried girls.

According to the many
young Hispanics I spoke to, more and more girls are getting pregnant. “This
year was the worst for pregnancies,” says Liliana, an American-born senior at
Manual Arts High School near downtown Los Angeles. “A lot of girls get
abortions; some drop out.” Are girls ashamed when they get pregnant? I wonder.
“Not at all,” Liliana responds. Among Hispanic teens, at least, if not among
their parents, the stigma of single parenthood has vanished. I asked Jackie,
the Guatemalan GED student at L.A.’s Belmont High, if her pregnant friends
subsequently got married. She guffawed. George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran
background who was kicked out of Manual Arts six months ago for a vicious
fight, estimates that most girls at the school are having sex by age 16.

Mexican
and Central American immigration to New York City is of much more recent
vintage than in California, but young Mexicans in New York have quickly
assimilated to underclass sexual behavior. Nineteen-year-old Ernesto Vega
reports that his oldest sister dropped out of school at 17 and got pregnant the
next year. “I heard her boyfriend came from Mexico to work, but he wasn’t
working. He was on the street.” Ernesto says. Then the boyfriend got arrested,
probably on drug charges. “He says he was arrested for doing nothing, but they
don’t arrest you for doing nothing.”

Ernesto knows three
or four Mexican-American girls with babies, including a 16-year-old with two
daughters. “Another just got pregnant this year,” he says. “She’s 15.” None is
married. None has a GED or will go to college. As for the fathers of their
children? “The boys be leaving the girls alone,” Vega says. “The boy goes
away.”

Some Hispanic parents
valiantly try to impose old-fashioned consequences on teen pregnancies, but
they are losing the battle. Vega’s father, a building superintendent and
hardware store clerk, angrily told his pregnant daughter, according to Vega:
“You gotta go live with [the boyfriend]. I now want nothing to do with you!”
The boyfriend offered to take the girl into the apartment he was sharing with a
female acquaintance, but she wanted her own place. Eventually, she persuaded
her father to take her back, but only on the condition that she work. She now
sells Yankee paraphernalia on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Traditional and contemporary
family values continued to clash throughout the pregnancy. Although the
boyfriend vanished until the birth, he showed up at Vega’s house with his whole
family when the girl returned from the hospital with her newborn. “He took his
three sisters and his mother; one sister took the nephews.” Vega recalls. The
boyfriend’s demand: you have to decide where to live. The girl told him to take
a hike. The family delegation, Vega judges, already adapting to American
individualist norms, was inappropriate. “The problem was not with the
families,” he says, “but between him and her.”

In one respect,
Central American immigrants break the mold of traditional American underclass
behavior: they work. Even so, Mexican welfare receipt is twice as high as that
of natives, in large part because Mexican-American incomes are so low, and
remain low over successive generations. Disturbingly, welfare use actually
rises between the second and third generation—to 31 percent of all
third-generation Mexican-American households. Illegal Hispanics make liberal
use of welfare, too, by putting their American-born children on public
assistance: in Orange County, California, nearly twice as many Hispanic welfare
cases are for children of illegal aliens as for legal families.

More troublingly,
some Hispanics combine work with gangbanging. Gang detectives in Long Island’s
Suffolk County know when members of the violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang get off
work from their lawn-maintenance or pizzeria jobs, and can follow them to their
gang meetings. Mexican gang members in rural Pennsylvania, which saw two gang
homicides in late April, also often work in landscaping and construction.

On
the final component of underclass behavior—school failure—Hispanics are in a
class by themselves. No other group drops out in greater numbers. In Los
Angeles, only 48 percent of Hispanic ninth-graders graduate, compared with a 56
percent citywide graduation rate and a 70 percent nationwide rate. In 2000,
nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 16 and 24 were high school
dropouts nationwide, compared with about 13 percent of blacks and about 7
percent of whites.

The constant inflow
of barely literate recent Mexican arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic
education levels. But later American-born generations don’t brighten the
picture much. While Mexican-Americans make significant education gains between
the first and second generation, adding 3.5 years of schooling, progress stalls
in the next generation, economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo have
found. Third-generation Mexican-Americans remain three times as likely to drop
out of high school than whites and one and a half times as likely to drop out
as blacks. They complete college at one-third the rate of whites.
Mexican-Americans are assimilating not to the national schooling average,
observed the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically
lower “Hispanic average.” In educational outcomes, concluded the bank,
“Ethnicity matters.”

No one knows why this
is so. Every parent I spoke to said that she wanted her children to do well in
school and go to college. Yet the message is often not getting across.
“Hispanic parents are the kind of parents that leave it to others,” explains an
unwed Salvadoran welfare mother in Santa Ana. “We don’t get that involved.” A
news director of a Southern California Spanish radio station expresses
frustration at the passivity toward education and upward mobility he sees in
his own family. “I tried to knock the ‘Spanglish’ accent out of my niece and
get rid of that crap,” he says. “But the mother was completely nihilistic about
her child. It’s going to take direct action from Americans to Americanize
Hispanics.”

Perhaps the answer to
the disconnect between stated parental goals and educational outcomes lies in
Hispanic culture’s traditional suspicion of education. Santa Ana police officer
Mona Ruiz recounts a joke told by comedian George Lopez: “When a white person
graduates, people say, ‘You did good.’ When a Mexican graduates, people say,
‘You think you’re better than us.’ ” The lure of an immediate income often
proves more compelling than a four- to eight-year investment in
self-improvement. New Yorker Ernesto Vega says he knows “Mexicans with papers”
who drop out of high school. “They young. They say, ‘I’m going to start
working, I don’t need school.’ ” But Vega has no illusions about the
consequences: “Even with papers, you’re only making $300 a week as a delivery
boy in restaurants, because you don’t know anything else.”

Proponents
of unregulated immigration simply ignore the growing underclass problem among
later generations of Hispanics, with its attendant gang involvement and teen
pregnancy. When pressed, open-borders advocates dismiss worries about the
Hispanic future with their favorite comparison between Mexicans and Italians.
Popularized by political analyst Michael Barone in The New Americans,
the analogy goes like this: a century ago, Italian immigrants anticipated the
Mexican influx, above all in their disregard for education. They dropped out of
school in high numbers—yet they eventually prospered and joined the mainstream.
Therefore, argue Barone and others, Mexicans will, too.

But the analogy is
flawed. To begin with, the magnitude of Mexican immigration renders all
historical comparisons irrelevant, as Harvard historian Samuel Huntington
argues in his latest book, Who Are We?. In 2000, Mexicans constituted
nearly 30 percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S.; the next two
largest groups were the Chinese (5 percent) and Filipinos (4 percent). By
contrast, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest immigrant group,
Germans, made up only 15 percent of the foreign-born population. In 1910, Great
Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in that order, sent the most migrants to
the U.S.; Italians made up only 17 percent of the combined total.
English-speakers made up over half the new arrivals; there was no chance that
Italian would become the dominant language in any part of the country. By
contrast, half of today’s immigrants speak Spanish.

Equally important,
the flow of newcomers came to an abrupt halt after World War I and did not
resume until 1965. This long pause allowed the country ample opportunity to
Americanize the foreign-born and their children. Today, no end is in sight to
the migration from Mexico and its neighbors, which continually reinforces
Mexican culture in American Hispanic communities and seems likely to do so for
decades into the future.

Contemporary
Hispanic immigration also differs from the classic Ellis Island model in that
the ease of cross-border travel and communication allows Mexican and Central
American immigrants to keep at least one foot planted in their native land.
Meanwhile, the Mexican government does everything it can to bind Mexican
migrants psychologically to the home country, in order to safeguard the annual
$12 billion flow of remittances. It encourages dual nationality, and Mexicans
in the U.S. can now run for office in Mexico. A Yolo County, California, tomato
farmer has already been elected mayor of Jerez. Not surprisingly, Mexicans and
other Central Americans have the lowest rates of naturalization of all
immigrants—less than 30 percent in 1990, compared with two-thirds of qualified
immigrants from major European sending countries, the Philippines, and Hong
Kong.

Even Mexico’s former
foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, acknowledges the unprecedented character of
Hispanic immigration. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote recently, “does have
distinctive traits that do make [assimilation] difficult, if not impossible.
This is . . . a matter of history.” That “history” holds that the U.S. robbed
Mexico of its natural territory in the nineteenth century, as some Mexican
immigrants never seem to forget. “It’s kind of scary,” says Santa Ana gang
intervention officer Mona Ruiz. “I hear, ‘I was here first; this used to be
Mexico. You stole it from us.’ ” Mexican-American Ruiz is herself called a
“traitor” for becoming Americanized.

While proponents of
the “reconquista” of “Alta California” (as Mexican nationalists call the lost
territory) are a small minority of Hispanic immigrants, a much larger
proportion hold on to their Hispanic identities. Few of the American-born
students I spoke to in Southern California identified themselves as “American.”
Many said they were “Mexican,” “Latino,” or “Mexican-American”—usages
encouraged by the multicultural dogma in the schools, a far cry from the
Americanization efforts of classrooms a century ago.

Michael
Barone’s Italian-Mexican comparison also ignores the differences between the
U.S. economies of 1904 and 2004. While Italian dropouts in 1904 could make
their way into the middle class by working in the booming manufacturing sector
or plying their existing craftsman skills, that is far more difficult today,
given the decline of factory jobs and the rise of the knowledge-based economy.
As the limited education of Mexican-Americans depresses their wages, their
sense of being stuck in an economic backwater breeds resentment. “The second
generation becomes angry with America, as they see their fathers faltering,”
observes Cesar Barrios, an outreach worker for the Tepeyac Association, a
social services agency for Mexicans in New York City. This resentment only
increases the lure of underclass culture, with its rebellious rejection of
conventional norms, according to Barrios. For this reason, he says, many young
Mexicans “prefer to imitate blacks than white people.”

The Spanish-language
media, which reaches two-thirds of all Hispanics, reinforces the sense of
grievance. Stories about America’s cruelties to immigrants and the country’s
shocking failure to legalize illegal aliens dominate news coverage. A billboard
for Los Angeles’s Spanish newspaper La Opinión conveys the usual tone:
“Justice,” “Abuse,” “Deportation,” and other hot-button topics blare out in
massive lettering.

Chicago provides a
cautionary tale about high levels of Hispanic immigration combined with an ever
more powerful underclass ethic. During the 1990s, the Hispanic population in
Chicago grew 38 percent, to 754,000, and became increasingly concentrated in
the city’s barrios. Education levels and fluency in English dropped lower and
lower, while serious crime, social disorder, and physical decay grew in direct
proportion to the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos. After a neighborhood
became more than 60 percent Latino, physical decay—including graffiti,
trash-filled vacant lots, and abandoned cars—jumped disproportionately. By
2001, social pathology among Spanish-speaking Latinos was higher than for any
other racial or ethnic group.

There
are many counterexamples that show a salutary effect of Hispanic immigration.
Santa Ana, California, at 76 percent Latino the most heavily Spanish-speaking
city of its size in the country, has cleaned up the seedy bars from its downtown
area and replaced them with palm trees and benches, in large part thanks to a
newly created business improvement district. Many homes in Santa Ana’s
wealthier Mexican neighborhoods sport exuberant roses and bougainvillea in
their front yards, and students I spoke to there wanted to become lawyers,
architects, and medical technicians. In predominantly Mexican East Los Angeles,
housing prices are soaring along with the rest of the Southern California
housing market: a 1928 two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow with a lawn gone to seed
was listed at $265,000 this April. And in increasingly Hispanic South Central
L.A., tiny bodegas selling milk, diapers, and piñatas are replacing liquor
stores.

Yet a seemingly
innocuous block in Santa Ana can host five to eight households dedicated to
gangbanging or drug sales. A front yard may be relatively trash-free; inside
the house, a different matter entirely, says Santa Ana cop Kevin Ruiz. “I’ve
been to three houses just this week where they made a mountain of trash in the
backyard or changed their baby’s diaper by throwing it over the couch. They
don’t use the indoor plumbing, while letting their dogs go to the bathroom on
the carpet.” Ruiz drives by the modest tract home where his Mexican father, who
worked in Orange County’s farming industry, raised him in the 1950s. A car with
a shattered windshield, a trailer, and minivan sit in the backyard, surrounded
by piles of junk and a mattress leaning on the garage door. “My mom taught us
that even if you’re poor, you should be neat,” he says, shaking his head.
Fifty-year-old men are still dressing like chollos (Chicano gangsters),
Ruiz says, and fathers are ordering barbers to shave their young sons bald in
good gang tradition.

Without prompting,
Ruiz brings up the million-dollar question: “I don’t see assimilation,” he
says. “They want to hold on [to Hispanic culture].” Ruiz thinks that today’s
Mexican immigrant is a “totally different kind of person” from the past. Some
come with a chip on their shoulder toward the United States, he says, which
they blame for the political and economic failure of their home countries.
Rather than aggressively seizing the opportunities available to them,
especially in education, they have learned to play the victim card, he thinks.
Ruiz advocates a much more aggressive approach. “We need to explain, ‘We’ll
help you assimilate up to a certain point, but then you have to take advantage
of what’s here.’ ”

Ruiz’s observations
will strike anyone who has hired eager Mexican and Central American workers as
incredible. I pressed him repeatedly, insisting that Americans see Mexican
immigrants as cheerful and hardworking, but he was adamant. “We’re creating an
underclass,” he maintained.

Immigration
optimists, ever ready to trumpet the benefits of today’s immigration wave, have
refused to acknowledge its costs. Foremost among them are skyrocketing gang
crime and an expanding underclass. Until the country figures out how to reduce
these costs, maintaining the current open-borders regime is folly. We should
enforce our immigration laws and select immigrants on skills and likely upward
mobility, not success in sneaking across the border.

Heather Mac Donald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and
illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass, and how the Mexican
government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts
state and local attempts to resist it. Steven Malanga shows how, despite much
argument to the contrary, Hispanic immigrants produce a net cost to the
American economy, not a net benefit, and he goes on to outline the kind of
immigration policy that would be both liberal and in America's interest. Victor
Davis Hanson writes about his own experience growing up in California's farm
country and watching the Hispanic immigrant influx transform his state for the
worse. The Immigration Solution proposes the same kind of policy in place in
other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the
basis of what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for
them.

*

A READER’S REVIEW ON AMAZON:

In the introduction of this well argued
collection of essays, Myron Magnet points out how the illegal immigrant
advocates engage in an Orwellian misuse of language. They describe themselves
as "pro-immigration" and not defenders of law breaking. The Late
Milton Friedman warned, "that you can't have free immigration and a
welfare state." Rarely, if ever, in our nation's past did immigrants
receive welfare benefits. Illegitimacy rates were low and the newest residents
desperately attempted to improve their lot in life. Today's illegal immigrants,
especially within the Hispanic community, are often anti-intellectual and
hostile towards the very idea of assimilating into the wider American
community. A dangerous permanent underclass is turning many of our cities and
towns into dystopian hell holes. Many well meaning people are so intimidated by
the false charge of racism and "nativism" that they prefer to pretend
the problem really doesn't exist. The intellectual virus of political
correctness regretfully dominates the discussion. Rational and dispassionate dialogue
is often near impossible. Sadly, many Hispanic citizens are also guilt tripped
into believing they owe something to these illegal residents. The situation is
only getting worse. Time may not be on our side. We obviously are not going to
shoot and mistreat the illegals. It is best that we instead find realistic
solutions to resolve the crisis. This book offers some excellent
recommendations.

The MSM hides the brutal truth from the American people. Few realize that the
Mexican government, for instance, hypocritically encourages its own citizens to
enter our country illegally---while it treats its own illegal immigrants like
subhuman creatures. This is a relatively short book of only 183 pages and an
index. It is perhaps the best book available for those who desire to acquire a
better understanding of this issue in a relatively short period of time. You
need to especially read The Immigration Solution before voting in November.

*

Review

"...A call to arms combined with an outline for a sensible
immigration policy." -- Thomas Tancredo, United States Congressman from
Colorado

*
"Even if you disagree with their preferred policy changes, their
suggestions are serious, provocative, and worthy of careful thought..." --
Dr. George Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social
Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the author of
Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy

*

"In this book, the writers from City Journal again show why that magazine
is so indispensable. Having helped change conventional wisdom on the urban
problems of crime and welfare, they have now taken a hard look at an issue even
more suffused with sentimentality and cliché. The Immigration Solution is
essential reading for anyone seeking to develop an informed opinion on this
vital national issue." -- Mark Krikorian, executive director of the
Center for Immigration Studies

*

"The Immigration Solution demolishes open-borders myths and provides a
clear, sane path toward an immigration plan that benefits America and adheres
to the rule of law. Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steven Malanga
battle muddled amnesty advocates with impeccable logic, facts, and principle.
This book is not just a must-read. It's a must-do. -- Michelle Malkin,
author of Invasion

*

"The Immigration Solution is a cogent analysis of our illegal immigration
crisis and the public policy choices facing America. This book is a critically
important read for our elected officials and the citizens they should be
representing." -- Lou Dobbs

*

"The Immigration Solution is essential reading for anyone seeking to
develop an informed opinion on this vital national issue." -- Mark
Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies

*
"The Immigration Solution is not just another book about the catastrophe
cause by millions of illegal aliens flooding our country; it is a call to arms
combined with an outline for a sensible immigration policy. If every member of
Congress would read this book, we might be able to beginning the process of
securing our borders and reducing the number of illegal immigrants within
them." -- Thomas Tancredo, United States Congressman from Colorado

*
"The Immigration Solution" is an excellent new book that discusses
illegal immigration without the political rhetoric, spin, demagoguery, and
unsubstantiated claims that have become all too common in the media and among
politicians.

*

It was written by three scholars at leading think
tanks -- Heather Mac Donald and Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute and
Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Unlike
many other scholars, they know how to write so that the general public can
understand what they are saying."--- -- Thomas Sowell, Real Clear
Politics

*

"The divisive debate over immigration is going to continue for some time
to come. MacDonald, Malanga, and Hanson lucidly present their concerns over the
current direction of immigration policy and offer more than a few suggestions
for change. Even if you disagree with their preferred policy changes, their
suggestions are serious, provocative, and worthy of careful thought-and,
regardless of your ideological background, you might actually find yourself
nodding more than a few times as you read through the book." -- Dr.
George Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at
Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the author of Heaven's
Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy

"A comprehensive and enjoyable history of the machinations behind and
history of DreamWorks and the personalities involved. ... A valuable resource
to discover some of the inner workings of the DreamWorks story." --Thomas
Jackson, American Renaissance, August 2008